


The Politics of Dancing

by Euregatto



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Excessive Drinking, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Starstone - Freeform, Woman on Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 09:37:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20864102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: "I’m supposed to be halfway across the galaxy by now, trying to make things right, but I’m a coward.” He leans on the jukebox and listens to an old voice sing of old ways. “No one else will say it to my face, so I guess I have to. I can’t stomach the idea of looking someone in the eyes and telling them their loved ones are gone forever because I couldn’t—”His throat swells.“I’m starting to wish I had disappeared, too.”---Or, Quill survives the Snap.





	The Politics of Dancing

**Author's Note:**

> For Anilu

~

Killing Thanos doesn’t bring their friends back.

It doesn’t fix a single goddamn thing.

Except, Quill never thought it would. Safe to say he still tries to believe they can get snapped back, but the stones are gone, and Thanos is without his head, and the universe is without half its working parts.

They cut their losses—not because they want to, not because they would ever want to—and go home.

It takes a few weeks to get used to being back on Earth, once he’s regained his strength; surviving for nearly thirty days, drifting through space with Stark and Nebula because the ship was fucked to hell when the moon came down, made him weak, so he remains until he feels better.

But then he feels better and is still on Earth.

Everything is different now. He’s surrounded by technology that’s stalled in its development somewhere between the 60’s and the Kree Engineer’s Revolution, yet it feels far beyond his reach.

Tony helps him for the first few days. Introduces him to a phone that can hold songs in the hundreds, with numbers for people he hardly knows and the list should be twice its size but he doesn’t say that, and lets him stay in a refurbished apartment near the old Avengers’ stomping grounds, free of charge so long as he keeps it clean. It feels dishonest, living like this. Unearned.

Rocket and Nebula come to see him—sometimes together, sometimes separate—though they don’t say much about their situation. Their conversations are carefully measured, dodging around the topics of a dead Gamora, a disintegrated Drax and Mantis, another goodbye to Groot.

It’s a time when it’s all about sentences that don’t fit anywhere so they’re relayed here, on his couch while they watch old Westerns and share takeout dinners; the proverbial attempt at distracting when the trauma lingers like a thin mist of morning dew in the grass, but in their minds, waiting to be disturbed by a newspaper thrown out to the wrong yard.

“You gonna be all right?” Rocket asks two months later, because he’s leaving with Nebula and Carol to fix some of the chaos Thanos left behind. It’s a selfless act. Quill thinks he’s beyond caring about the universe and everything in it and that’s why he’s staying on Earth, a home he barely remembers in anything but his blood, though he tells Nat it’s because he needs a little time or he might do something reckless.

(He might do something reckless, anyway.)

“Yeah,” he lies. He kneels to the floor and gives his friend a hug. “Keep in touch.”

He hugs Nebula too, despite the fact she’s still new to the concept of affection and almost knifes him on reflex. He tells them to be safe.

Then they’re gone, and Peter Quill drinks.

He’s at the 24-hour diner again because there’s nothing else to do at nearly 2 a.m. but feed the jukebox some grimy coins to hear the songs that used to fill his heart to fullness, when she walks in with two sets of rifles, two sets of pistols, two sets of knives and a pensive expression, like she’s got a bone to pick with everyone. He doesn’t consider her at all. She goes right by him and sits at the counter and orders tea.

He drinks his beer and doesn’t look at her for the length of the song he’s paid for, but then it ends and she’s right behind him.

“You should ask it out on a date if you’re going to stand that close.”

Quill isn’t in the mood. He sighs, takes his drink by its neck and steps aside. “Whatever. All yours.”

The woman tabs through the playlist excitedly. He looks at the stone on her choker. “You Americans have a real attachment to the past,” she says to him. “Are any of these blokes even still alive?”

He says, “If they were, there’s a fifty-fifty shot they aren’t now.”

She laughs. It’s filled with resentment and an agony that scooped her hollow. “I don’t know who I feel worse for—the folks who got shagged by chance or the ones who watched them disintegrate. You must have lost a few friends, yeah? Since you’re out here getting plastered, all alone.”

“Yeah, well, I’m the reason they’re gone.”

“Everyone’s feeling a bit gutted. You don’t have to take it so hard on yourself.”

Quill shrugs. “No, it’s literally my fault.”

She doesn’t reply to that. Instead she holds out her hand. “Got a coin?” He gives her the last quarter in his pocket, and she uses it to select an oldie but a goodie. “I’m Elsa Bloodstone.”

He throws back the rest of his beer. “Peter Quill.”

“You always blame yourself for cosmic disasters, Peter Quill?”

Yes.

“Sometimes,” he says. “Only when I screw everything up. I’m pretty good at that, though. Screwing up.”

“Were you really there?” she asks.

“Yes. I’m supposed to be halfway across the galaxy by now, trying to make things right, but I’m a coward.” He leans on the jukebox and listens to an old voice sing of old ways. “No one else will say it to my face, so I guess I have to. I can’t stomach the idea of looking someone in the eyes and telling them their loved ones are gone forever because I couldn’t—”

His throat swells.

“I’m starting to wish I had disappeared, too.”

Elsa turns to him and holds out her hand again. “Shake,” she says firmly. He quirks his eyebrow at her. “You’re a real tool, yeah? Listen to a dame when she tells you to do something. Shake my hand.”

He does.

“There,” she says to him, “now we’re friends, and the galaxy is a little less empty for you and me. You’re on the right track.”

He smiles for the first time in weeks. It feels strange on his face, but not unwelcome.

“Thanks, Elsa.”

They wind up back at his place, for lack of anywhere else to go, and they’re barely through his front door before she’s got both hands around the back of his neck and her tongue in his mouth. This isn’t unwelcome either. She’s a lethal force, taking what she wants, teeth on his bottom lip and nails in the soft flesh of his throat. The opposite of Gamora: ungentle, which meant she had a childhood.

He thinks of Gamora and jolts back, hits the door, sucking in deep breaths. “Uh, sorry, I—I’m sorry—”

She’s looking at him, pupils blown wide with lust, but her hands are still at her side, in control. “Quill?” she tries, closing the distance between them. “Hey, easy, darling. It’s all right. You’re all right.”

“I’m sorry.”

She puts her hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to apologize.”

“It’s—you reminded me of—”

“You don’t have to explain, either. Do you want to go to bed?”

He looks tired, feels tired, might be a little more than drunk. He nods and she takes his hand, following him up the steps to his room. They strip in a way that isn’t at all the sexual excitement he typically earned after a long night of drinking with attractive women, but it makes him feel normal when she gets under the covers with him in only her underwear and a shirt he gives her, which is much too big and smells like him.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and she puts her head on his chest.

“It’s all good, luv. We can stay like this.”

He wraps his arm around her back and they fall asleep this way, unfinished.

She’s gone in the morning, but her number is written on the notepad on his fridge.

He texts her first, after a few days of mulling it over and nearly a hundred redrafts of what he wants to say to her. He fumbles with questions upon questions, feeling exposed to the world anew, wondering if it’ll reward him with goodness or hostility.

> _Hey. _

He breathes deep.

> _It’s Quill. What are you doing tonight?_

Hits send.

He waits nearly an hour before the ding goes off in his pocket.

> _I can be free._
> 
> _Got something in mind?_

He hasn’t thought that much through. His thumbs hover over the screen, and he tells her,

> _Haven’t been to Earth since I was a kid. I’m experiencing everything._
> 
> _Like to dance?_

She texts him back,

> _Love to. Club?_

He realizes he’s smiling, and his hands are shaking a bit and his heart is racing.

> _Absolutely._

They go to some place in Manhattan that serves potent cocktails and plays music he isn’t accustomed to, even though it’s very much like the underground parties he’s been to all over the galaxy. He drinks a bit more than intended, and she gets closer than he expected he would be comfortable with, and he doesn’t mind the normalcy of it. Neither of them is dressed to kill.

Bodies press against him from all sides, and halfway through a song Elsa kisses him and he sucks her lower lip between his teeth, earning a deep moan he can feel reverberate through his chest by proximity.

An image of Gamora flashes through his mind. Drax, calling out to Quill in a sudden moment of agony, his eyes screaming _help me_, before crumbling to ash. Mantis, drifting, a quiet realization in her features, frozen in place by the fear.

He jolts back, and Elsa already has her hands on his shoulders, stilling him.

“Sorry,” he says, then excuses himself to the bathroom to piss and checks his phone to find a missed text message from Nat that says,

> _Reminder: meeting on the 6th._

Ah, he had forgotten to put it in his calendar, even though he’s skipped the last ten. They were getting progressively more spaced out.

His phone dings again.

> _You should really come this time. They miss you._

He leaves the text on read and returns to the dance floor. Elsa leans into his ear and asks him, “What’s with the melancholy, luv?”

“Work,” he replies. “We can talk about it later. I just want to dance right now.”

She seems to accept that answer and lets him lead her into the next song.

They don’t talk about it, when later inevitably happens. Quill doesn’t think they’ll get around to it. He has her pinned up against the ally wall, his mouth on her neck, two fingers in her cunt, and a distant understanding that tomorrow he’s going to have one hell of a splitting migraine.

Tony ensures that Quill isn’t left alone, though that might be the fault of Pepper Potts and her constant vigilance wearing at Stark’s delicate constitution. Quill knows that Stark’s moved into some nice house with a lakeside view, and he sometimes dares to check the group chat to see invites for lunch. Everyone is busy a lot of the time. Quill isn’t, it’s just easier not to reply.

His phone goes off when he’s sitting out on the beach with Elsa, shoulder-to-shoulder, neither of them really dressed for the tepid spring weather, but it’s also a last-minute thing. She returns from England after only a month away, makes up some excuse about Werewolves this time, and tells him she wants to see the ocean. He doesn’t quite understand her motives nor why it leaves an ache in his heart.

“You should go,” she says, when he shows her the lunch invite. “These people are your friends, darling. Let them in a little, then more, and more.”

“I lose the people I’m close to,” he tells her, matter-of-factly, as if there is no alternative. 

The beach is half as full as it could have been. They see a little girl by the water’s edge, carving out sand to form a pathway for the moat ensnaring her castle, and Quill watches her, wondering if she’s capable of understanding the depth of what’s been lost. He thinks the world will be rebuilding itself for the rest of its life.

Elsa puts her arms around him and pushes him down into the sand. He gasps, intaking the salty air, feeling the coarseness of it in his chest like pin pricks, not enough to hurt but enough to tell him he’s alive against the odds.

She says, “My brother used to tell me, there are places in our lives where things have happened, and there are places where things have to happen. Go to it, or let it come to you, yeah? But understand that you can’t complain if you don’t do it.”

He looks out at the horizon, the thin press of sea to sky where one transmutes into the other, and he can’t tell which is which.

“He’s gone, then,” he says. “Your brother.”

Elsa’s smile dips. “Yes,” she utters, setting her head in the crook of his neck, “but we aren’t.”

He holds her to him and feels the breeze, heavy against his skin.

He’s at lunch with Tony, Pepper, and Bruce for the first time, remembering that it’s okay to enjoy things sometimes, when his phone vibrates twice in his pocket. He opens the notification to see an address and a selfie of Elsa posing in front of a Ferris Wheel, dated for tomorrow.

“Must be someone special,” Bruce says with a grin.

Quill starts, fumbling with the phone. “Ah, that’s _not_—she’s just a friend. A monster hunter. Like, vampires and stuff. We can use an ally like that, right? Just in case?”

Tony raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t believe Quill’s denial any more than him. “Is that why you’ve been ghosting me?”

“I have _not_—”

“Pepper, has he been ghosting me?”

Pepper laughs. “He _has_. Where’d you two meet?”

Quill isn’t sure if he should be entirely honest, though he’s sure they’ve kept tabs on him in the last few months (Nat, at least, certainly has), so he merely says, “At a jukebox. She asked for a quarter.”

“That’s good,” Pepper says with a reassuring smile. She reaches across the table and pats the back of his hand. “That’s _wonderful_, Peter.”

“Thanks. It doesn’t matter though. I’m thinking I need to stop moping around and really get back out there, you know? Help Rocket and Nebula. Make up for what I did.”

“This isn’t your fault, Quill,” Bruce says.

“You don’t have to make me feel better,” he replies, though his tone sounds foreign, even on his own ears. Like maybe he’s just talking to talk and doesn’t actually mean a word of it. “I have to take responsibility for it, and I can’t do that from here. Can’t keep feeling sorry for myself.”

The table is quiet for a moment. Morgan coos from her highchair, and Tony reaches over to spoon feed her a bit of oatmeal.

Bruce says, “You should bring her to dinner with us.”

Quill shrugs. “I can’t—I mean, I guess I can, do that.”

“You should,” Pepper says.

“You’re going to,” Stark insists.

Quill sighs. They’re persuasive. “Okay, okay. I will.”

When he gets to the fairgrounds by the beach, he finds Elsa at the front gate, holding up a roll of tickets. “Care for a little fun, luv?” she asks like he could possibly say no, and he smiles and takes her by the waist.

And they do have fun. It isn’t weird, or uncomfortable for him. It feels like he’s experiencing his childhood all over again, and he talks about that much—really, she’s quite easy to talk to, and he tells her everything. About his mother, his father, Yondu and Gamora and the Guardians. He opens up and lets it out and then finally asks her what she’s doing in America.

“The short answer,” she says, “is that I needed to get away from home. See the world a little to help ease the pain of losing my brother, yeah? Everything seems so small now though, after all your stories.” She takes his hand. “I want to ride the wheel.”

They take the Ferris Wheel all the way to the top before she says anything else to him.

“My brother,” she tells him, leaning on his shoulder, “and a few of my friends. We were running an operation when he said he didn’t feel too right. Next thing I know, he’s dust. Just like that.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. Her admission wraps around his neck like a noose and he can feel it tightening. “I was _weak_, I wish I could have—”

She traces the edge of his mouth with her forefinger. Her touch stills him, and he’s standing on slick ice, that misstep waiting to happen—and he wonders how she’s managed to have this effect on him. “You worry far too much about what you can’t be responsible for, darling. It’s no one’s fault but the homicidal maniac who snapped his fingers.”

“That’s…fair, I guess.” He sighs, and plants his feet, and braces his heart. “Hey, Elsa, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, luv.”

“I know you probably don’t want to stay here, and maybe I’m asking too much—”

She says, “You want to be a fling, yeah?”

“Er…more than that?”

“Oh, darling,” she says with a flirtatious purr, and kisses him. “I thought we already were.”

He misses the meeting, and all the ones after that, but he does _try_—gets in his car and takes the highway, making great time, hard to hit traffic with half the population erased from existence—but he ends up turning around and driving home, hands trembling.

(Nat still texts him, as if she knows he wants to be there.)

He calls her. He’s drunk and rambling, a sorry state he almost missed after things started to align for a minute there, and she finds him on the couch, polishing off a bottle of honey whiskey by himself. “Quill,” she tries to say, because he’s crying in a way that reminds her of a distant memory she bites back down. “Hey, luv. What happened?”

“I can’t do it.”

“Do what?” She looks over at his phone, the packed bag for the overnight trip, and it clicks. “Put the bottle down, darling—”

“What does it matter?” he hisses back. “Why do you care? I don’t _deserve_—”

“I care about you more than anyone else,” she says, “and—and I don’t have anyone else I _can_ care about. So, please, will you—just put the bottle down, yeah?”

There’s a deep, hollowed-out emotion to her voice that doesn’t have a name in this moment, or maybe it does exist, but she conveys it in the wrong way. It sounds equivalent to the wrenching pain that tore through him when Yondu held his face in death; he understands she has no one to go back to.

“So we go forwards,” he mutters.

“All we got left,” she says.

He caps the bottle and unburdens it on the floor.

Quill enjoys having the weight of her legs over his shoulders and her hips grinding on his face. He uses three fingers and his tongue, crooking them in just the right way to make her come in hard, desperate pulses. She’s a quick study, loud as a bullet. He doesn’t have to think about anything but making her scream and it’s not very long before she’s _begging_.

“Condom,” she pants out, “please tell me you’ve got _something_.”

They’d never gone this far before. A fault of his own, he breathes out a quiet, “Fuck it,” reaches into the nightstand and rips open the foil packet with his teeth.

She rolls them over, slides the condom on, her other hand scrunching through his hair. Her eyes are electric, something translucent and blue, like the thin quality of thawing ice over a lake. Soft and deceptive.

“Slow,” he utters, sitting up and kissing her chest. “I want to feel you.”

She settles into his lap, taking him into her in one full stroke; she emits a quiet whine, then exhales his name. He can’t help but moan softly, making the noises she clearly likes to hear because she clenches hard around him. There’s a red blush that spreads through her chest like fire. He finds it cute, and tells her that much.

“There you go with the compliments again,” she says, groaning as she lifts herself up and slides back down. He pushes her open, thick and full, and the unfamiliar burn of him runs deep. “Oh, oh, _mercy_—”

“How could I _not_?” He puts his mouth on her throat and his hands on her hips, pulling her to his base. “You’re—you’re _amazing_—”

She laughs, and it devolves into a heated moan as she takes him in and meets his thrusts. A fire builds in her stomach as they fuck. He can feel it, her tension, her desperation, the quirk of her hips so he hits her sweet spot at an angle that makes her sing with heat and delight. She’s jolted by his pace, slick and hot around him, trembling with the anticipation of it.

At the precipice of her orgasm, the intermittent ebb and flow of it within her torso, she gives in and bends forward, a wilting flower succumbing to the moonlight, her flesh milky white in the muted dark. Close, she’s _close_—

“Elsa,” he pants out, “come on, baby, come for me—”

She gives in. Her body rocks forward, nails in his shoulders, drawing blood, teeth sinking, animal-like, into his collarbone, and he shudders at the feel of her pulsing and collapsing around him, the acute jabs of pain in his skin, and when he comes its effortless, easy. It feels unlawful and adverse to the way he lost everything else in his life: drifting away, but because he wants to.

“I’ve been thinking about making things right,” he says over breakfast the next morning.

She looks up at him from over the rim of her mug. “Maybe you need a break,” she counters, sipping her tea, which has become cold in the absence of prioritizing it. “You can always make things right once you’ve made things right with yourself. You’re hurting.”

“Hasn’t this been enough of a break?”

She doesn’t look at him. “Has it?”

He opens his mouth, but the answer fails him. It occurs to him he doesn’t have one. He lowers his gaze to his coffee, rendered emotionally inept at the dawning realization that guilt had been compelling him through the last few years; the inertia is manifested in an emptiness that falls through him and keeps falling, unable to hit the ground.

“Yeah,” she says, not unkindly, “that’s what I thought.”

It’s been five years since Thanos’ head bounced across the floor and all Quill can focus on is the wedding he wants to plan for the following spring. He’s come to accept that this is their world, their universe now. That Thanos won. That his friends are gone, and this is all he has left. So, he goes ever forward, and rebuilds: accepts a position as a tech consultant for Tony’s new projects, buys a house in the suburbs, and proposes to Elsa, who’s taken up work pulling reconnaissance for Nat.

He shows up a meeting too, for the first time, and brings Elsa with him. Rocket and Nebula like her, and though they say that much, he can tell they're actively not mentioning Gamora by name. Still, it makes him feel vindicated. Enough that he attends a few meetings after that too.

Everything, it seems, is going well.

And everything continues to go well until he sees the text that conveniently pops up on his phone screen from the group chat in the middle of him learning to repair the solar fusion cells in the back of a proto-suit for Stark.

> _We can fix this._

The day before they’re slated to gather at the old site, Quill picks up his wedding bands from the jeweler. It’s much too early to have them engraved, or to even give one to Elsa, but he strings hers up on a chain and gives it to her over dinner that night.

“I want you to hold on to it,” he says, “just in case something goes wrong on this mission.”

“I’m coming with you,” she tells him firmly.

“You absolutely are _not_.”

“We’re finally making things right in our lives, yeah? I’m not letting you get killed.”

“I know. It’s just time I took responsibility for what I’ve done. That’s not something you should have to—”

“It’s my choice,” she says. “I’ve made it.”

He knows he can’t change her mind. They fall into silence, somewhere at the precipice of a fight they’ve never had before, and he feels the weight of her resolve in his hands. He doesn’t know what to do with it all and fumbles, opting to reverted the subject to something more normal.

“Do you like the ring?”

“Of course, I do. It’s beautiful.”

He says, “But you haven’t looked at it.”

Elsa gives him a weary smile and turns the band over to read what he's engraved inside it.

_Ever forward._


End file.
